At it again

If you are 20 something and between school and a job it is hardly remarkable these days to be seen somewhere out in the world with a backpack on getting your taste of adventure travel. It is pretty much a right of passage for many. What is a little more unusual perhaps is to be out there doing it when you are a family man with a career and in your mid-40s. Enter me (Dylan) and Neil, 2 ex-backpackers staring down the barrel of middle age and unable to let go of the past.

In our day we had worn out shoe leather and bicycle tires on some of the more out of the way backpacker trails the developing world had to offer and in some cases may have even pioneered the odd new one. Twenty years on and that hunger for adventure that drove us then, the dreams and the pure pleasure of living in the moment are luring us back once more.

As I write this it is 20 years and 1 month to the day since we set off from Urumqi in China's far north-western province of Xinjiang on a bicycle trip that would take us west for 2000 kilometres. It would take us across searing desert and frozen mountain ranges along the Silk Road to Pakistan via the lung busting Khunjerab pass (opened to foreigners just 2 years earlier). In doing so Neil and I became, if not the first, one of the very first sets of foreign tourists to cycle what has since become one of the classic adventure cycling routes of the world.

For 2 months we scarcely saw another western face, had almost no contact with friends or family back home and no access to news of the outside world - it was perfect! Hardly surpising then that 20 years on we find ourselves heading back there with the idea of doing it all again (well, all except the Pakistan bit.....).